Aim of sermons on the Old Testament Part 4  By Graeme Goldsworthy 2004-09-01

This is all we perceive. One thing that is obviously I think needs some clarification,
something by some of the questions I've been getting on the side and so on.
When I say every text or every part of the Old Testament refers to Christ,
I think you've got to think carefully what is meant by the word text.
In my book, a text is something that you have to work at to determine its limits.
There are some aspects of a text which are just part of a texture of description or something
and I wouldn't even spend time trying to work out how a minor aspect of description of something
is fulfilled in Christ or testifies to Christ. Some of it might and some of it might not.
One of the things that encourages me to think more in terms of the broader aspect of a text as a whole.
It does require, and I think this is an important part of doing exegesis
and how you sermonize and so on is how much of the actual biblical text you take as your unit.
One of my professors at Union Seminary in Virginia gave us all a paper on principles of exegesis
and his first point was you simply establish contact with the text but you have to establish also
what you regard and what can be regarded as the limits of the text.
That is how many verses in your Bible actually belong together as a unit.
Now texts may also belong together without further text.
But what is the unit that you can reasonably take as something to preach on or to teach from?
I was reminded of something like this when we were dealing with the book of Daniel at college
and we're doing it again in our home group at church.
And you may remember how when Daniel has these weird visions
and he sees all these incredibly strange things happening
and an angel comes along and stands by him and says, do you understand what you see?
And Daniel says, my head hurts.
And the angel says, this is what it means.
And if you put down the things that Daniel has described that he's seen
and you put down in a column beside it the things that the angel interprets
you'll see that the angel only interprets the salient features.
Whereas some people sort of want to sail in and say, you know, the three teeth mean this
or the four talons mean that and this little bit means something and that little bit means something
as well as the angel wasn't fussed by that sort of thing at all.
The angel came along and said, you know, this big picture with all the little bits and pieces in it
which is just part of the texture of the painting if you like.
I think it's part of the art of literature that instead of treating all literature
as sort of a flat kind of thing, some literature is more like a painting.
You don't rush up to the Mona and Eliza and say, you know, what's this little bit in the background all about?
What's this little bit down here?
It's just part of the thing that goes to make the whole thing.
And I think we have to sort of develop a bit of that approach when we're dealing with the biblical texts
because remember the biblical writers were in their own way and according to their own culture
literary artists and they don't have a sort of clinical sort of biological dissection approach to their literature.
So that's just sort of a caveat on how you come to the biblical text.
So when I say that everything refers to Jesus, I'm thinking more in the terms of literary units
and what that literary unit is about.
I also would say that not every text, again a fairly undefined word, is as central as every other text.
That is, there are some texts which are so central to the main message of God
and others which are more peripheral.
One of the faculty members at Union Seminary used to say there are some texts on the Old Testament
he doesn't think he could preach from and he didn't think you should preach from.
Now I don't know that I'd agree with that.
But I can think that there are a lot of texts that, given the priority of I don't have that much time left,
even if I lived to 90, and even if I preached every Sunday or even twice a Sunday
I still wouldn't be able to get through the whole thing and anyway who'd be around to listen to me?
So I think all of us engage in a set amount of prioritizing when it comes to determining
what we want to preach on and what we want to teach about.
Okay, well the topic which is down in your notes for this last session today
is the aim of sermons on the Old Testament.
And once again, I mean, you know, I tend to try to specify in a way that is hopefully logical
and outline so that you can take that away and think about it
but I tend to sort of speak fairly ad lib and off the top of my head.
So a lot of the things that come up in later sessions I've already talked about
and that's happened again now.
But I just want to emphasize in this first point that are we wanting to become like Jesus
or do we want to become like Moses or some other person?
And the answer has to be you want to become like Jesus.
Well, then the question is can we become like Jesus if all we see is the exemplary preaching?
So I put it down simply in terms which are fairly stark but which I think are worth considering
whenever we're setting out to deal particularly with an Old Testament passage
is are we preaching Christ or are we preaching man?
And the answer I think is obvious.
You could probably, without thinking too hard, think of the times when you've heard Christian sermons
or convention addresses which have sort of picked the eyes out of some prominent Old Testament character
without very much reference at all to how that relates to the Gospel.
It seems to me that that means you end up in a sense with two Bibles and almost two religions.
One is in the Old Testament, one is in the New Testament.
So once again you come back to the question of how do we perceive the unity of the whole Bible?
And I've already told you how I think you do that.
The confusion over the relationship of the for us and the in us is one which all I can do is urge you
to think on constantly and to be aware of the, you might say, the grammar of salvation.
And the grammar of salvation is frequently reflected in the grammar of the language of the Bible.
That is ask yourself why you have an imperative when you have an imperative.
And usually the imperatives in the Greek or the Hebrew come through in the English translations
if they're a halfway good one.
Now there's some halfway terrible ones too which I would not like people to use.
And Bible translation is just another whole area which we don't have time to go into.
But I'm sure we're all aware that we have our preferences and we ask questions as to why we have them.
It came up to me in the little home group I joined at the church we're at now
and we'd read around the passage, we'd read Acts chapter 1 so we'd divide up the number of verses and round we'd go.
And out of eight or ten people there would be six or seven different versions.
And somebody said, it gets confusing, some of them are all these different versions.
I said yes it does.
And I said some of them are not very good versions either.
Because some types of Bible translation work on a principle
which seems to be tailor made to hide what the text is saying rather than to elucidate it.
And we were talking about this at lunch time about how you have in Bible translation there is
there's sort of a continuum between what they call dynamic equivalence
which looks at the sense, the concept which is there
and the formal equivalence which looks at the words that are there.
And the problem for Bible translators is not an easy one.
You need to be aware of that when you're praying next to your friends here in Wycliffe and so on.
It's a tremendously difficult task because you say well if we work on the one end of the continuum
of dynamic equivalence we go for the concept.
The fact is that the Word of God has come to us in words not concepts.
The concepts have been conveyed by words and sometimes the words are put in such a way
that if you simply go for the concept you fail to see the connection between the concept that is conveyed there
and the concept that is conveyed somewhere else.
And the classic example that we were mentioning is that when the translators pick up the Aramaic
of Son of Man in Daniel 7 and translate it as one like a human being
it totally eradicates the connection which I believe is there when Jesus says that he is the Son of Man
and you don't see the connection.
So that's another area that we need to look at and bear in mind.
Go for a good translation and this of course is why in theological colleges
some of us still believe in teaching Greek and Hebrew.
Many of them have ceased to do it taking the line of least resistance because they believe it's too hard.
But for pastors who have wrestled with Greek and Hebrew and know really the blood sweat and tears that are involved
we still think it's worth it because there are not too many people who will go out into their pastorates
and be able to pick up the New Testament or the Old Testament in their original languages and be able to read it.
But what they will be able to do is sort through when there is a problem
or when a commentary does refer them to something in the original language as a point of distinction
or something worth noting.
So that's another area and most of us have to depend upon the experts
and usually the expertise is at the level of Bible translation.
So make sure you use good ones for preaching and teaching.
I've already made the point that the only way to grow is to go on with the Gospel not from the Gospel
and the only way to grow is in terms of the Gospel and I don't want to keep hammering that one.
So if we agree that the way we grow as Christians not only become a Christian
but the way we grow as Christians is through our relationship with Jesus Christ
then we must either discard the Old Testament or we must use it as a means to helping people grow into Christ.
Now it might be a good point here to ask if anybody wants to ask a question at this point.
I'm happy to field anything now.
I think I've probably said enough provocative things to get you going.
Yes Greg?
Okay that's worth doing.
Again as I understand it what is happening in allegory is that
a concept is picked up on
or even some words
and removed from its historical context because the historical context is seen as compromising it.
Now if you're aware how allegory crept into the Christian church is it came in by the Jews in Alexandria
and they learned it from the Greeks.
And it was a Greek trick to enable Greek philosophy and Greek religious thought to be somehow joined up.
See so if you've got something that looks sort of mythological
and you've got a whole bunch of people who are thinking hard headed sort of philosophy and stuff
what you do then to make the two sort of compatible is you start interpreting the mythology
as something which is simply mythologically referring to something else.
And the way you get from that to the something else may depend on what sort of framework you're working from
whether it's Greek philosophy or in the case of the Jews working from the history of the Old Testament
through to a more sort of Hellenistic way of thinking.
Now the way that it worked with the Christians was
it was really a way of handling the problem of the Old Testament I suppose first and foremost.
And the early Christian allegorists people like Origen and Clement in Alexandria learned this trick
but what was going to be the framework which they used?
Well there were two basic ones one was the New Testament and the other was church doctrine.
So rather than seeing the particular concept, the text or the institution, the person or the event
within its historical context and looking at that in terms of the redemptive historical progress
from Abraham through and so on and so forth.
It was just simply the idea that was there.
So I mentioned the one about the stuff on the priest's robe, the homogram that's embroidered on the priest's robe
and instead of asking how they functioned in the law, prescriptions in Exodus for the making of the priest's robe
and the answer might be decoration, he's an important guy, he would have important looking clothes.
From a framework of Christian theology this particular Bible teacher said
pomegranates, fruit, fruit of the spirit.
The idea that Christ is in all the scriptures, others have gone from the fact that the Ark of the Covenant
was made of wood and overlaid with gold.
Well wood equals humanity, gold equals divinity.
So the gold overlaid wood is typological of the person of Christ and his two natures.
Never mind the fact that it speaks of a particular heresy called Nestorianism.
Now that was sort of what the allegories did.
Now typology, and typology developed later.
The typologists were determined to maintain the historical meaning of the text.
And what they said was not that here's an idea and we'll use, you know, like the first thing that comes into your mind
which is perhaps conditioned by church doctrine or something else, to give it a spiritual meaning
because I can't see any spiritual meaning in the form that it's got.
That's the way the allegorists worked.
The typologist said now here is something that happened in history, it functioned in a certain way spiritually
at that point and finds an answer in something further on where the same basic concept comes up
but at a greater, more advanced level.
And so the sacrifices in the Old Testament were in various ways seen as typological of Christ and his sacrifice.
And they were given the clue from some of the direct links made in the New Testament
like Paul saying Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.
So I suppose the key difference is the allegorists were not interested in the historical context of the original text.
The typologists were determined to maintain it
and to understand the meaning as being drawn from the links made in the Bible itself.
Yes Peter?
Somewhere your other boss says that the entrance to the house of typology
is at the farther end of the house of symbolism
by which he's making the point that something has to be a symbol before it can be a type.
What do you think of that?
I think the boss also makes the point that something can be quite literally happening
and therefore in its own context is not symbol.
He makes this point in his biblical theology about the story of the Garden of Eden
that historical events can be symbolic of something else.
So you see, you really have to pin down what you mean by symbol.
Representing some spiritual truth as a pattern.
Well, or representing something else.
I mean you walk out the road there, there are symbols.
Whether you take any notice of them is up to how you drive
but there are symbols out there like stop signs, speed signs, traffic lights.
They're all symbols.
Nobody's saying like the lady who speaks with the red traffic lights said,
well seen one, seen them all.
You interpret the symbol in that particular context.
Now I think what Voss is saying with regard to the story of Eden
that historic events can be symbolic of something else.
And see, the trouble with spiritual, what do we mean by spiritual?
That's one too that, you know.
So typology, and I suppose I'd agree with what you're saying Dave.
I just want to know how to pin it down.
In the Old Testament things were not necessarily seen as typological at that point.
As I don't think.
Here I disagree with the guy I was asked to debate when I was in England three years ago
who believes that Abraham knew the full gospel and that we were saved by faith in Jesus Christ.
My report to that was, well if he knew that he should have been flogged for not saying so.
Fancy hiding that great truth from us all.
If Moses knew the full gospel, he ought to be flogged for not saying so.
And I just find that incredible.
So I don't think that Moses would have grasped the point at that stage
and if he'd stopped knowing saying, well what is, what are the laws of burnt offering symbolically?
I don't know whether he could have given much of an answer to that.
Let's say this is what the Lord requires of us.
If we are obedient and we believe that we are forgiven and so on.
Does that represent the fact that we need our sins forgiven
and that God is prepared to accept some kind of a substitute?
Oh sure, that's an interpretation.
Oh okay, if that's what you remember that's fine, I know some of that.
And that just goes to the fact that everything simple, every word you utter is a symbol.
Yeah, I suppose, maybe.
Yeah.
Just a quote that I...
Okay.
I think Greg's question is important because you will find if you start talking about typology,
you'll have people waltzing up to you and say, oh I thought allegory was, you know, not a good thing to do.
So I'm not talking about allegory.
So you want to be very clear about the distinction between allegory and typology.
And then somebody will float by, you know, the reference to Paul using allegory in Galatians.
And the question is whether he uses the word there in exactly the same way as it was generally used,
whether that is a true allegory.
It may be, but I think it's more than allegory.
See, Paul is not just waltzing off into the nether glimm,
or the unknown and picking something out of the air.
He's not doing like Stephen Langton, the 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury,
who said that when Boaz asks the question when he sees Ruth gleaning in the fields,
whose maid is this?
Now see, if I was to put that in front of you as a text and say, well what are you going to do with this one?
You'd put it in that context, you know, the whole narration about Ruth and how it goes and how it ends up.
But Stephen Langton said, no, no, the significance of this is that the bishop is inquiring of his,
his ordinand, whether he is sufficiently gleaned in the scriptures to be ordained as a priest.
He said, well man, you know, top marks for imagination.
And when the king of Israel falls through the lattice window and hurts himself,
the significance of this, Stephen Langton, was the bishop who became a moral cropper.
Now that's the sort of thing, you see, that it was uncontrolled spiritualizing of the text.
I have nothing against spiritualizing because I think the New Testament does it.
I don't know whether there's anybody here who believes that prophecy has to be interpreted literally.
By now you'll have realized I don't believe that.
But I've had it said to me on more than one occasion, if you don't interpret prophecy literally,
you'll make it mean anything you like.
And all I can say is that's rubbish.
You could make it mean anything you like.
You can make it mean anything you like if you try and interpret it literally.
Because it's simply impossible to interpret all the prophecies literally
without having them clash all the way along the line.
But spiritualizing is a word which can be given a perfectly legitimate meaning
if you understand it in terms of the way the New Testament picks up
and applies the meaning of concrete events and real people in the Old Testament history
as being fulfilled in the spiritual work of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Okay? That is the real spiritualizing.
So in my view there is no such biblical, hermeneutical principle.
Principle of interpretation which says literal.
Jesus Christ is the hermeneutic principle of the Bible.
Christological interpretation of the Old Testament is the way Jesus and the apostles
and the New Testament writers in general proceed.
And I think that is so important.
Anybody else want to come in on that?
I don't want to tread on any toes but I feel strongly about that one
and I think it's important that we don't just follow some tradition that we've been brought up
without thinking through the implications of it.
Alright, the second point that I make in this section is that
the vital question, how does this text testify to Jesus?
And we've talked about this all day.
But I still wanted to put it here so that it's here.
Can I preach a Christian sermon without mentioning Jesus?
Now I know that there are a lot of people who disagree with me on this.
My first question is that why on earth would you want to?
Why would you want to preach a sermon without mentioning Jesus?
I mean Jesus tells us, Jesus is the final word about God.
Jesus is the final word about humanity.
Jesus is the final word about the creation.
He's the final word about everything.
And it seems to me that it's really strange to want to preach a Christian sermon
without the Christian part of it.
Now let me just add this and I've made this point in the book on preaching
that I believe there are different strategies that apply in different situations.
So I don't want to go off half-cocked on this one.
If for instance, as I have been, a member of a home study group, home group in local church
and as one, when we were back in Sydney, on stage we were working through the book of Samuel.
Now the expectation was that every time we met, whether it was weekly or fortnightly, I forget which,
most of us would be there, we'd be there if we could be, and there would be continuity.
So it never bothered me if we went through a study and never got beyond, you might say,
the close reading of the text, what was actually being said in the book of Samuel.
Never asked the Jesus question, never bothered me.
Because I knew sooner or later we would have to get to that question and we'd all be in on it.
In fact, what intrigued me was, without any prompting from me,
I found people constantly bringing up the Jesus question.
We didn't get very far in the text about Samuel without somebody wanting to ask the Jesus question.
So that's one strategy, I would not be pushing the Jesus question.
The second one would be Christian parents, when Dad is leading his wife and kids in Bible reading and prayers,
however you do it, according to the age of your kids.
Say you're working through the story of Moses and the Exodus, once again, the fact that they're there,
they'll be there, there tomorrow, the day after, the following week and so on,
the expectation is that it's going to be continuous.
I would not, you know, get the shirt in the knot if the Jesus question didn't come up for a week or two.
But sooner or later it'll come up, or it should.
But I do agree with my friend John Chapman, who said,
if somebody wanders into your church one day,
and they've been brought by a friend, or whether they just, for whatever reason,
just passing the door and saying, I wonder what they're on about,
and comes in, and if that person sits down and actually listens,
they ought to be able to go away knowing what we are on about.
And is it not true that out there, and you hear it through the various media,
people commenting about churches and so on, about religion,
that the ordinary person, if they think about religion at all, about Christianity,
thinks that Christianity is about being good so that God will accept you,
and you go to heaven when you die.
So the last thing we want to do is to give an impression that that's what we're on about.
And the only way to do that, I think, is to make sure that a sermon, at some point,
gets round to the issue of grace and forgiveness and so on, insofar as it's appropriate to the text.
And it may be fairly peripheral, but... Yes, Andrew?
Can I ask a bit of a missing question there?
Would you say you couldn't preach sermon without mentioning that the sermon relates to the Gospel,
rather than mentioning Jesus?
So, could you certainly preach a sermon that mentions the aspect of the Gospel
and says it's got character, or what it relates to, without actually mentioning?
Well, I suppose you could. I mean, I don't want to sound wooden on this, but yeah.
I suppose my first reaction to that would be
the character of God gets its final and definitive expression in the personal work of Jesus.
And in the end, you see, I suppose one reason why I would prefer not to do it that way,
you know, by choice, is that people talk about God God all over the place.
Whereas, and they will have the idea that God means the same thing to everybody.
Now, I know that you can have something the same problem with Jesus,
but at least if you can pin it down to the personal work of Jesus,
I think you're getting closer to the implication of the Gospel.
Would it be a principle of text selection?
Somebody raised this question before about, you know, besides the text,
Jesus says the whole Bible testifies Christ.
And you also said that little bits may not, holograms.
Somewhere in between those extremes, should we try and pick out text,
say they'll test the narratives, make them big enough so we get to the point where we can preach Christ.
In other words, is this a principle of text selection?
I think it probably is.
I don't think there's too much problem when you're dealing with, say, narrative stuff.
If you recognize that narrative units at least have to include some sort of meaningful action
and character building and all that sort of thing.
Probably one of the more difficult ones is like preaching on Proverbs.
Particularly the sentence literature in chapter 10 and following.
You could be very nitpicky and moralistic by just taking one or two Proverbs.
It's not easy to do.
And I have to say that I haven't preached on Proverbs very much.
But I think the last time I did so, I took the whole of chapter 10 as one of my sermons
in which I showed how the writer was concerned to make the distinction between wise and fool,
righteous and wicked.
And then that raises the question as to what we mean by wisdom and folly,
what we mean by righteousness and wickedness.
And that sort of leads you then to try to unpack the whole concept.
And once you're doing that, I'll be doing a bit of that tomorrow when we get on to Solomon.
Once you get on to that, you get into areas which actually take you far beyond what the average person
thinks they're all about.
And you see this constant, here's a guy who, whether he was responsible for all these Proverbs,
which is fairly unlikely, but he's certainly responsible for putting them all together in one chapter like this.
And he obviously wants us to get the hang of the idea that righteousness and wickedness,
wisdom and folly are opposite ends of the spectrum which impinge in so many different ways
upon the way we understand our just ordinary day-to-day living.
And that to me then leads us to raise the question as to how they perceived these concepts in the wider context.
So yeah, I think your text selection, it comes back to what is the textual unit?
And this is pretty important for instance in the prophets because sometimes it's very difficult to know
where a prophetic oracle begins and ends.
And also it raises the whole question as to how the prophetic oracle is structured
or whether it does matter where it begins and ends.
Mostly I think it does.
Anything else while I'm having a drink?
Okay.
Well the third point is the process from exegesis to sermon application which is really my last point.
And I'm feeling all talked out and you're probably feeling all listened out.
But just anything that you want to discuss on this would be a fair game.
But this is sort of my way of leading into tomorrow's discussions.
The logic of from text via exegesis and hermeneutics to sermon.
What is the logic?
I would like to, you know, there's a lot of things we can talk about here but I'd just like to feed into you
the possibility that exegesis is not a self-evident exercise.
That exegesis is actually a theological exercise.
That we may not need to reflect on it but actually I think it's a good idea to perhaps to think
and realize that it's there.
So my way of thinking it does link with the whole doctrine of word and language and the way God has communicated by word.
It's quite a fascinating study really, you know, as to how word becomes so central to the biblical idea of communication.
The very fact that God is seen as creating via his word.
Now why did he use word?
Does that literally mean, you know, a great voice burned out?
And how can God have a voice if he doesn't have a voice box in there to pass over and this sort of thing.
So that's not the point but the fact that the concept of word which then becomes so central to the way human beings
think and act and communicate and so on.
But the Bible tells us that God created the whole universe by a word.
And that it was a word that was self-authenticating.
That is, nothing had to sort of sit back and say, hang on, we better test this one and see if there's any truth in it.
Before anything happened, God spoke and it happened.
He didn't snap his fingers to bring the universe into being.
He didn't think it into being, he spoke it into being.
And I think part of that, and this is only a part, is that the Bible is impressing upon us the fact that
as those who are created in the image of God, we are created as speakers.
And we are created in God's image so that we can understand the word of God.
And there's a sense in which the word of God is self-authenticating.
Now, I'm making a point of this because some of you, if not all of you, will at some time have encountered
the fairly recent phenomenon which we put under the broad umbrella of postmodernism.
And in the study of how the Bible has been interpreted, the emphasis has shifted,
just as in the criticism of Biblical texts and so on, the emphasis has shifted from trying to understand
what the original author intended to say, that of course raised questions as to which author do we mean.
Do we mean the ultimate author, God?
Or do we mean the human author who is responsible for writing it down in the way that it was transmitted to us?
And then of course you have the further question of somebody else passing on to us, but how is it?
So the whole emphasis shifted from, that was the emphasis at one stage.
We actually used to refer to that as literary criticism and source criticism,
and those of you who have had to study this sort of stuff will know the sort of excruciating business
of sorting through JEDP and how many people wrote the Pentateuch and this sort of stuff,
and how many eyes are as there were.
Much further along the way, the emphasis changed in a way that had the potential for a great deal of good.
That was the emphasis shifted from trying to understand who wrote and how many sources there were,
to what actually is the text on about?
What is the text saying?
So people were no longer sort of turning themselves inside out, trying to work out whether there was one or...